Posts tagged “male privilege”

At some point, the word “feminism” took on ugly connotations. So ugly, in fact, that women will distance themselves from the term, claim not to be feminists. While that seems incredibly problematic to me, so is the fact that “feminism” somehow no longer means “advocating equality for women and men” but somehow means becoming stridently obnoxious about women’s rights, or requiring cheesy hippie approaches to womanhood, or that women hate men (something I’d like to generally avoid, as men can be quite charming and really rather awesome).

This is unfortunate on a number of levels, and I think there needs to be a general redefinition of “feminism” as something that both women and men should want to take part in. Definitions aside, I’ve noticed something about how things get shared and handled on both Twitter and Facebook that I find incredibly shitty.

When I share or tweet an article about rape, the only people who share, retweet, or comment? Women.

I wrote a post about misogyny. 1 guy ‘liked’ it. 2 guys commented, to make jokes.

The post about misogyny was in response to a guy I called out for comparing his irrationally bad mood to PMS in women (thus perpetuating the stereotype that women are irrational and continuing to give license to men who, when they don’t like a woman’s behavior, would like to complain about “that time of the month”). I had my say and his response was, “ok.” Maybe he thought I was being irrational—just like a woman? All I figured was that dude was too cowardly to admit that he’d fucked up.

Well, fuck that. Fuck all of that.

Dudes, bros, come on. Where is your feminism? I am not asking, by the way, where your love for women is. Saying you’re a feminist because you love women is like saying you are Jewish because you love hamantaschen.

Okay. For the sake of this post, let’s create a loose definition of “feminism” with some very basic concepts:

Recognizing that women are just as capable as men are.

Recognizing that women deserve equal pay to men.

Recognizing that stereotypes about women are bullshit and should be avoided: let each woman define herself; don’t define women.

Recognizing that women don’t exist for others to desire/use/fuck—even if being desirable or fuckable is something they do and enjoy.

Recognizing that double standards with regard to sexuality and enjoyment of sex are ridiculous.

Recognizing that rape is an issue (and yes, I know that women can also rape, but the majority of rapes are committed by men, and that majority is gigantic. I also realize that men can rape other men and do regularly, so just standing up against rape in general is a Good Thing—all right?)

Using your voice to emphasize all of these things, to help pass on the message, to share, to do something as simple as retweet.

Why are men leaving the discussion about feminism, about rape and rape culture, up to women? Why is it only their job to fight for their rights, to stand up to rapists and abusers? Why, when men send rape threats to women who have stood up for themselves, don’t their friends say, “Dude. Not cool.”? Why, when a girl is sexually assaulted and her assaulters share the photograph of the assault, don’t people rally around the girl, why don’t they support her, why aren’t we teaching teenagers that bullying is bullshit? We have had two suicides in rapid succession of young women who experienced such intense bullying after being sexually assaulted that one of them couldn’t even move schools without it following her. Why are teen boys not telling their friends, “No way, dude. Leave her alone.”?

I don’t understand.

I don’t understand why people are still sharing posts about how women can avoid being raped, about the times they can walk alone outside, about how they should wear their hair and their clothes—thus leaving the victim-blaming discussions wide open (I mean, really, did you see what she was wearing?) and making it so easy to blame women for not being careful enough. I don’t understand why there aren’t more discussions about teaching youth about rape—discussion about sex is so taboo in schools that it’s left up to parents who are apparently in denial about the situation or think their kids are too young to learn about it. Well, guess what? They are old enough to rape, they are old enough to learn why rape is unacceptable. I don’t understand why we aren’t teaching young men to love and respect young women.

And learning it from only women is also unacceptable. Men, you need to add your voices to the arguments for equality. It’s easy to say that women should obviously vote, because that’s a right they already have. It’s more difficult to stand up for equal pay, for removing double standards, for cutting out casual misogyny (like unnecessary comments linking irrationality and women). It’s more difficult to let go of your privilege when a woman points out the rampant misogyny in gaming and at conventions, and support her. It’s more difficult to stand up to your friends when they misbehave. It’s difficult for teenagers to go against the social flow—high school is a breeding ground for cruelty and insensitivity—and it’s difficult for us to teach them that standing up for women and taking a stand against rape is necessary. But if you really genuinely believe that women have just as much a place in the world as you do, then you have got to. It is fucking necessary.

And if you don’t believe that, I don’t want to know you. And don’t get me started on the so-called Men’s Rights movements, which are nothing short of delusional.

This morning, I found out about #1reasonwhy. In the last day, many women working in the game industry have been posting on Twitter, each of them sharing their experience as a professional woman working in an industry that, even today in 2012, struggles with sexism and discrimination. Reading their stories was shocking to me, as a woman and as a long time gamer. It made me sad for an industry that I had higher expectations for. But at its core, the AAA game industry suffers from the same assumptions that plague many “old boy’s club” companies: it is a male dominated field that believes they have no reason to market to women, that women can only make “games for women”, and that women don’t enjoy the same things in a game that men do.

This is bullshit.

I am 38 years old, a woman, and a gamer. I’ve been a gamer since I was a child, playing Pac-Man and Frogger. In my teens, I played Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering. As an adult, I continue to play “tabletop RPGs”, computer and console games. I don’t play Facebook games. I have no interest in them, when I could be shooting aliens in Mass Effect 3 or Gears of War 3. There is this perception that women only play Facebook games, or that only women play them.

This is bullshit.

A good friend of mine plays Facebook games. A lot of people, both men and women, do. A lot of them aren’t “gamers”, and some of them are. Some of them are kids, and some are grandmothers. My friend who plays on Facebook? She got tired of the limitations and asked me, a gamer, what else she could do. Now she plays Diablo 3 on her PC. I guess you could say Facebook games are gateway games that anyone can play, not just women.

The gaming industry is big money. A best-selling console game now makes as much (or more) money as a blockbuster movie does. No one questions whether or not men and women go to those movies. But apparently the gaming industry believes that only men buy their games that sell over 3 million copies in the first week. Many companies believe they don’t need women to design or contribute to these games, because after all, women don’t buy them.

Leaving aside the completely asinine idea that women don’t have anything to offer a game marketed for men, I think the games industry is really missing the boat by ignoring the female gender. In the distant past, maybe games were something largely played by boys and men, but that stereotype is as incorrect as it is outdated. I think the games industry believes that all they need to make is Call of Duty X: The Same as The Last Nine Games. And you know what? That’s a very successful franchise, but it’s my husband’s least favorite first person shooter, because it is the same damn game over and over! Like many gamers I know, male and female, he is appreciative of more.

I am a girl gamer, and personally, I think games could only benefit from having more real input from female designers, writers, developers, artists, you name it! I’m not saying there aren’t men who do these jobs, and do a great job at them. But I am saying that the games industry is depriving their product of something special when they don’t give women the same chance to contribute on every level. This is true for all of the male players, but guess what games industry? WOMEN PLAY GAMES. More than that, we play the so-called AAA console games!

I am a girl gamer, and here are some of the games I have played or currently play: Gears of War 3, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the entire Mass Effect trilogy, including Mass Effect 3 online multiplayer, the Assassin’s Creed games, the Dragon Age series, Skyrim, Fallout…yes, as you can see I have a “type”, RPG, or roleplaying games. However, I am just really discovering multiplayer online games such as Gears of War 3, and do you want to know why? Because Mass Effect 3, an RPG game that has a recognized female gamer following, took a risk and added an online multiplayer mode. And it was fun! First and third person shooter type games don’t market to women. They should. They should give us characters to care about, a story to enjoy (it doesn’t have to be as big as an RPG story), and female characters to play. I like to play Anya when I play Gears.

I am a girl gamer, and I don’t just share my husband’s Xbox; I have my own damn Xbox. I play my own games. I play games with him. I play games with my male and female real life friends. I play games with male and female players I’ve met online.

I am a girl gamer, and I have friends who are girl gamers. There are enough of us in my own circle of friends that we can have an all-girl team when we play Diablo 3 or Mass Effect 3.

I am a girl gamer, and my husband’s friends text me to play with them as much as they text him, sometimes more.

I am a girl gamer, and often when I play online, there are male gamers who are surprised that I am a girl, that I play, and that I like playing. They ask me how they can get their girlfriends and wives to give it a try, and to answer that, I return to my original point: the game industry needs to wake up and realize they have two genders to make games for and market to.

I am a girl gamer, and I don’t want games about puppies, or shopping, or fashion. I like games where I get to be the heroine and save the universe. I like games where there is a good story, where I care about what happens to the world, the universe, and the characters. I like games where I get to be the badass.

I am a girl gamer, and I like games that have a romantic subplot, or hot male characters to look at, just like men like games with hot female characters. This isn’t necessary for me to enjoy a game, but I think most female gamers and game designers will agree with me when I say it sure doesn’t hurt!

I am a girl gamer, and I like to play online with other gamers. I am learning to be brave and try games I would never have tried before because of the male gamers I play with. Not because of the gaming industry, which doesn’t market these games to me, but because my male gamer friends tell me “If you like X game, you should really try Y, because I think you’d like it.” And sometimes they tell me when I shouldn’t try a game, because they know I won’t enjoy it. Sadly, this happens more often than it should. More often than it would, if female developers were given the same weight as their male counterparts.

I am a girl gamer, and I support female game designers, writers, artists, developers, and more. They should not have to deal with sexism in their field. They should not be condescended to, or minimalized, or ignored. I believe they could bring something special to the gaming industry. I believe they could help make the kind of games that I want to play, that other women want to play, and that men want to play, too.

Wake up, games industry.

In addition to being a gamer geek, Charity Vandehey is a writer, jewelry artist and espresso addict. She’s been writing online in one form or another since 2002. Visit her Etsy store, Byzantium Lotus!

So, as you might discover if you are anywhere near the internet, Daniel Tosh is an asshole and the debate over whether rape jokes are funny and acceptable continues.

However, that’s not actually the issue, for me. Comedians walk, cross, leap over, smudge, and kick the line of what is appropriate—that’s their job. We don’t have to like what they are saying or doing. We don’t have to appreciate it. We don’t have to approve of it. We can say what we like about it. But what Daniel Tosh did was far worse.

Because he made a rape joke, and a woman pointed out to him that she didn’t appreciate it, and he got angry. And his response was to single her out, and then threaten her and intimidate her with rape. Guys, that wasn’t a joke. That wasn’t part of his routine. Tosh got mad and threatened a woman with rape. And it doesn’t matter whether he was serious or not, although what he said, he said in anger and that really makes me question where he was really coming from.

This isn’t an issue of whether he gets to make rape jokes. That’s covered by the First Amendment. He gets to make rape jokes. Tracy Morgan gets to go on homophobic rants. The Westboro Baptist Church gets to picket funerals.

This is an issue of a man who, as Molly points out in this fantastic piece, lost control and threatened somebody with violence. This is an issue of an audience that laughed when he did it. This is an issue of people who are suggesting that a woman deserved to be threatened with rape because she dared to speak up about it in the middle of his routine. This is an issue of the tweeters whose response to that woman’s story was to threaten her with yet more violence:

(Collection gently ripped off of @sfslim‘s Twitter feed, because he totally and unwittingly did that homework for me like a champ. And no, he didn’t RT these assholes because he agrees with them. Quite the opposite.)

The issue is that we live in a culture where it is okay to threaten a woman with rape, because it was, in theory, “just a joke.”

ETA: Some doubt has been cast on the accuracy of this woman’s story, which may excuse Tosh to a degree, but still does not excuse the reactions of those who felt rape and being threatened with rape are appropriate punishments for her. So I’m gonna let this post stand as is.